Woah! AP Fact Checks Obama On Health Premiums, Says “Liar!”

I wonder if the White House will now start assaulting the Associated Press for daring to stand up and say “liar!”

Buyers, beware: President Barack Obama says his health care overhaul will lower premiums by double digits, but check the fine print.

Premiums are likely to keep going up even if the health care bill passes, experts say. If cost controls work as advertised, annual increases would level off with time. But don’t look for a rollback. Instead, the main reason premiums would be more affordable is that new government tax credits would help cover the cost for millions of people.

Listening to Obama pitch his plan, you might not realize that’s how it works.

Liar! And where will all that money come from for those tax credits? Oh, right, taxes on the rich, meaning, “you get a paycheck? You’re rich.” Rather than money being spread around the economy through people and companies purchasing items, it will go straight to the government coffers. Then the government can say “hey, you want that tax credit? You have to purchase one of our government approved health insurance plans.”

Simple solutions: cross-state purchasing, nationwide pooling, and health savings accounts (which reduce costs by causing people to think twice about running off to the ER because they have the flu, instead of going to their pharmacy. Yes, a bit more complicated than that. HSAs work best as behavior modifiers.) Personally, I have no problem with legislation that tells insurers that they cannot drop people who get sick and have been paying their premiums.

BTW, the AP settles an issue from the other day, vis a vis Obama’s 3,000% gaffe

A White House press spokesman later said the president misspoke; he had meant to say annual premiums would drop by $3,000.

A report for the Business Roundtable, an association of big company CEOs, was the source for the claim that employers could save $3,000 per worker on health care costs, the White House said.

You know how they can save that money? They dump their health insurance offers, pay the fine, and tell their employees to have fun in the Exchange. Companies, per the Senate bill, could save $4k-$10k per year per employee.

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